October’s picks include a movie that left me unsettled, a book I somehow missed, and a podcast I’ve only just started. Add in a little help from my Facebook friends and there is plenty here to keep me occupied as the days get shorter.
I hope you find something here to add to your own list. And if there’s a book I’m still missing, you know where to find me.
Cheers, Dana
Oddly funny, deeply unnerving, and one of the most satisfied I’ve felt leaving a movie with so little resolution. An odd combination, I know. You Can See Everything left me with plenty of questions, but apparently I don’t need all the answers to appreciate a movie. I’ll spare you the spoilers. If you’ve seen it, I would love to compare notes.
Books I Thought I’d Read (And Other Lies I Tell Myself)
I read To Kill a Mockingbird along with one of my kids recently and realized that I had never read it. How did that happen? Somehow it was missed in my academic curriculum, although I had clearly filed it away as something I’d already done. (Apparently knowing the title doesn’t count.)
Which made me wonder what other great books I may have missed. So I asked my sphere on Facebook, and the reading list grew quickly. Classics, memoirs, poetry, books people love enough to insist that someone else read them. I thought you might appreciate the list too. I have some catching up to do.
The full list follows below.
The Apparently I Have Some Catching Up to Do List
1984 — George Orwell
The Aeneid — Virgil
Angela’s Ashes — Frank McCourt
Animal Farm — George Orwell
Atlas Shrugged — Ayn Rand
The Bell Jar — Sylvia Plath
Beloved — Toni Morrison
Beowulf — Anonymous
Braiding Sweetgrass — Robin Wall Kimmerer
The Brothers Karamazov — Fyodor Dostoevsky
Cadillac Desert — Marc Reisner
Cannery Row — John Steinbeck
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents — Isabel Wilkerson
The Catcher in the Rye — J. D. Salinger
The Count of Monte Cristo — Alexandre Dumas
Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Crucible — Arthur Miller
The Divine Comedy — Dante Alighieri
Don Quixote — Miguel de Cervantes
Down and Out in Paris and London — George Orwell
East of Eden — John Steinbeck
Ender’s Game — Orson Scott Card
Fahrenheit 451 — Ray Bradbury
Foster — Claire Keegan
Frankenstein — Mary Shelley
The Grapes of Wrath — John Steinbeck
Great Expectations — Charles Dickens
The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings — Maya Angelou
The Iliad — Homer
In Cold Blood — Truman Capote
Invisible Man — Ralph Ellison
Jitterbug Perfume — Tom Robbins
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell — Susanna Clarke
Lord of the Flies — William Golding
Macbeth — William Shakespeare
Maus — Art Spiegelman
A Midsummer Night’s Dream — William Shakespeare
My Ántonia — Willa Cather
The Odyssey — Homer
Of Mice and Men — John Steinbeck
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest — Ken Kesey
One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel García Márquez
Open Veins of Latin America — Eduardo Galeano
Paradise Lost — John Milton
Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World — Pádraig Ó Tuama
Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen
The Prince — Niccolò Machiavelli
Roots — Alex Haley
The Shipping News — Annie Proulx
Small Things Like These — Claire Keegan
Song of Solomon — Toni Morrison
Sophie’s Choice — William Styron
A Tale of Two Cities — Charles Dickens
Their Eyes Were Watching God — Zora Neale Hurston
The Thorn Birds — Colleen McCullough
To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee
To the Lighthouse — Virginia Woolf
Twelfth Night — William Shakespeare
The Underground Railroad — Colson Whitehead
The Warmth of Other Suns — Isabel Wilkerson
Where the Red Fern Grows — Wilson Rawls
The Yellow Wallpaper — Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — Robert M. Pirsig
Zorba the Greek — Nikos Kazantzakis
Good Life Project is new to me, and I started with the pilot. Jonathan Fields, the host, is an entrepreneur and author of How to Live a Good Life, Uncertainty, and Sparked. Much of his work comes back to what makes work meaningful and how we want to spend our lives. I appreciated that his own introduction starts closer to home: father, husband, maker. A little more interesting to me than the usual list of accomplishments.
The question behind the podcast is a big one: what does it mean to live a good life? Happiness, relationships, purpose, work—there are quite a few ways into that conversation. I’m only one episode in, so I can’t claim to have worked my way through the archives. But I’m already listening, and it felt worth passing along while I’m still at the beginning.
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